With the advent of advanced airborne cooling systems it has become quite important to provide a new approach to the requirements of maintenance, supportability and logistics. The principal problem is to support these high technology systems with personnel frequently possessing inadequate skill levels, to require fewer maintenance personnel and to reduce maintenance time and complexity.
In addition to ground or flight line challenges, there is a need for the highest possible probability of mission completion for the systems considered. In the case of vapor cycle environmental control systems, this essentially involves relative insensitivity to reasonable refrigerant leakage rates.
Heretofore, vapor cycle environmental control systems on aircraft predominantly have been charged and/or topped by charger/topper systems used primarily in ground applications. This is particularly true when the topper/charger involves a refrigerant composed of different components, such as a binary refrigerant mixture. Ground charging/topping procedures have been used primarily because of the varying ambient conditions experienced by the craft in flight, such as because of very cold temperatures and the resulting pressure differentials. Ground charging/topping is much easier to accomplish. However, it would be desirable to provide an on-board refrigerant charging system which can be initially charged on the ground and subsequently topped in flight. This invention is directed to providing such a system in the form of a new and improved airborne charger/topper design.